Indian Slave Research Articles

Blake's Coded Designs of Slave Revolts

Haitian Revolution of 1791 reached the shores of all the slave colonies of the Americas. But the Saint-Domingue Revolt, as it was called at the time, was the most influential, harrowing, and longest (1791-1804) of the West Indian slave insurrections. slave revolts influenced the British emancipation movement (Matthews), and the literature. Blake was electrified by them, especially the Haitian Revolution (Wood, Slave)) 192; Poetry 143-144). It rolled through his 1790 prophecies: America: Prophecy (1793), Europe: Prophecy (1794), and Song of Los (1795). Critics name these the because they arc set on the four continents of America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. However, should signify not only the slave-owning colony that became the United States but also the West Indian plantation colonies with their constant revolts going back to the mid-1600s. Blake's familiarity with the experiences of slavery in other colonies of the Americas underlies his 1791-1792 engravings for John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Narrative itself contained graphic descriptions of the tortures by which the planters disciplined their slaves, and when Blake engraved the Continental Prophecies several years later he drew on a detailed knowledge of slavery in the sugar colonies. Sarah Salih suggests how problematic such fictions of atrocity (64) can be, for the viewer is situated at a safe textual remove from the enslaved people (70). However, Debbie Lee shows that Blake's engravings are subversive precisely because he brings his viewers close to the slaves (90) through their self-possession (107-111). They look out directly to the viewers in an intimate complicity. Critics have noted the striking parallels between the Stedman engravings and the designs for Blake's works of the 1790s (Linebaugh and Rediker, 344-47). Blake duplicates the image of the spread-eagled rebel from his famous plate #71, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack, in The Poison Tree of the Songs of Experience (Davis, 56) and the Preludium of America: Prophecy (Erdman, 231). Many designs of the Continental Prophecies belong to the larger context of his Stedman engravings that became iconic with the abolitionist movement. In a comprehensive and complex way, those engravings imply support of slave resistance as Stedman's narrative does not (Lee, 88-90). 1791-1792 engravings reach a high pitch in Blake's designs alluding to plantation slavery, and some of his later works parallel their key illustrations. Several of the most graphic were reproduced repeatedly in the popular abolitionist media: #11, A Negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows; #35, Flagellation of a female Samboe slave; and #71, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack. Figures duplicating the posture of Neptune in #71 (as Stedman names him, 285-6), who was thus being broken, appear often in different Blake works. His Stedman engravings in particular influenced designs for the Continental Prophecies. Indeed, if one looks at the designs of the Continental Prophecies as a whole, they strongly oppose West Indian colonial slavery. designs encode his real intent as the texts do not, specifically, his support for the rebelling slaves in the unfolding Saint-Domingue Revolt. This advocacy culminates in Europe: Prophecy, in which the designs present the capsule history of this Revolt up to 1794, when the French left and the British began their own attempt to take the colony and restore slavery. designs of the Continental Prophecies thus provide a significant dimension missing from the accompanying poems, save for the Preludiums of America and Europe. In them, Blake prophesies the end of the slave trade, initiated by colonial slave insurrections such as the Saint-Dorningue Revolt then underway for three years. As nearly all critics recognize, these Continental Prophecies present a vision of the point when forces of cultural repression grow unendurably constrictive and are broken down by the spirit of revolution. …

Indian Slaveries

Indian Slaveries Jenny Hale Pulsipher (bio) Alan Gallay, ed. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. viii + 440 pp. Maps, contributor biographies, and index. $60.00. For nearly a century, the chief authority on Indian slavery in early America was Almon Lauber, whose book on the subject was first published in 1913. The title of Alan Gallay's recent collection of essays seems intentionally to echo Lauber's Indian Slavery in Colonial Times, but in the last decade that venerable work has largely been superseded. In 2002 we saw the publication of two Bancroft Award–winning books on Indian slavery: Gallay's The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717, and James F. Brooks' Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. A growing number of scholars are also contributing to a revival of the subject. Alan Gallay's recent collection of essays, Indian Slavery in Colonial America, showcases this work, plumbing issues and raising contradictions that will undoubtedly spur additional scholarship. Gallay notes in his introduction that these essays challenge two "binary paradigms" of early American history. One is the stereotype of "European versus Indian." As applied to the history of Indian slavery, this approach assumes that Europeans imposed slavery on Indians. In his own contribution to the collection, "South Carolina's Entrance into the Indian Slave Trade," adapted from his 2002 book, Gallay corrects this misperception. Rather than introducing slavery, which already existed in Indian societies, Europeans "expanded it immensely, prompting a frenzy of slaving that extended from the Atlantic Coast to Texas, and from the Ohio River South to the Gulf of Mexico" (p. 109). Denise I. Bossy's essay, "Indian Slavery in Southeastern Indian and British Societies, 1670–1730," underlines the fact that the slave trade operated between Indian societies, not just between Indians and Europeans. She recounts the story of Lamhatty, a Towasa Indian who was traded from one tribe to another until he was finally sold to the English. Like Gallay, Bossy claims the English intensified and transformed Indian slavery from a small-scale system serving political and cultural ends to a commercial one for the purpose of exploiting human labor. The sixty-year time frame of her study allows her to describe [End Page 234] the devastating impact of the growing slave trade, as well as the warfare and disease that followed it, shrinking the native population of the Southeast from nearly 200,000 in 1685 to 90,000 by 1715 (p. 219). Indians finally turned on English slave traders in the Yamasee War, targeting and killing ninety out of one hundred English traders and destroying the commercial trade. Indian slavery in the aftermath of the war returned to its earlier form, serving political and cultural rather than economic interests. While Gallay's and Bossy's essays focus on the origin and development of the Carolina slave trade, C. S. Everett describes its immediate precursor in "'They shalbe slaves for their lives': Indian Slavery in Colonial Virginia." Everett explains that Indians were enslaved early in Virginia's history, during the first Anglo-Powhatan war of 1622. Fifty years later, slavery had become profitable, and Everett makes the striking assertion that Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 was, at root, an unsuccessful effort to gain control of the Indian slave trade. I was not entirely persuaded that Nathaniel Bacon was someone with the foresight to manipulate events in his favor, instead of just a loose cannon, but it is an intriguing possibility. Everett notes that Bacon's partner in the attempted takeover was William Byrd, who later became instrumental in the Carolina slave trade. While Everett's essay is occasionally hard to follow, it is notable for its prodigious primary research, including some sources only recently discovered. One of the topics Gallay introduces is what motivated participation in the Indian slave trade. His own contribution to the volume focuses on the motives of the English participants, exploring what impelled them to defy restrictions the distant proprietors of Carolina imposed on relations with Indians. Indian motivations get less attention, a fact that two other contributors, Joseph Hall and Jennifer Baszile, point...

Slavery in Indian country: the changing face of captivity in early America

* List of Figures * Introduction * Inequality, War, and Captivity * The Indian Slave Trade * Crying Blood and Captive Death * Incorporating Outsiders * Owned People * Violent Intimacy * Racial Slavery * Seminoles and African Americans * Conclusion * Notes * Acknowledg ments * Index

Introduction: New Essays on “Race,” Writing, and Representation in Early America

IntroductionNew Essays on “Race,” Writing, and Representation in Early America Robert S. Levine (bio) The essays in this issue of Early American Literature are linked by their interest in race, which remains a problematic term in early American studies (see, for example, the roundtable on race in the 2006 Early American Literature [41.2]). Inspired by Henry Louis Gates’s edited collection “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986) and Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1989), US Americanists of the past several decades have tended to address race in relation to black-white binaries; but as Ralph Bauer and others have shown, race in early American studies should also be thought of in relation to creolization, nationalism, colonialism, a range of ethnicities, capitalism, styles of discourse, and native studies. In the hybridized space of the Americas in particular, what made a person “white” or “black” or “red” when there were interracial sexual relations across the color line? And when did color really matter, and in what ways? Reflecting on Thomas Jefferson’s rumored sexual relations with his slave Sally Hemings, William Wells Brown, in his 1853 Clotel, presents light-complected slaves whose genealogical connections to “black” people were sometimes well known and sometimes not. Brown’s large aim in this and other of his writings was to destabilize race so that racial thinking itself would come to seem a form of (cultural) insanity. Perhaps more crucially, by underscoring the links between Thomas Jefferson and the situation of the 1840s and 1850s, Brown wanted to call attention to the centrality of racial ideologies to the first sixty years of the new republic. Brown’s insights have been developed by a number of recent critics, who have argued for connections between US literary nationalism and a white racial nationalism (see Gardner). With respect to race, one of the distinct contributions of this set of essays is the chronological time frame, which diverges from a deceptively coherent [End Page 199] focus on the “rise” of the US nation from the late 1780s to the 1850s to examine instead the late seventeenth century to the mid-1830s. Race, writing, and representation, in such a frame, become even more unstable, given the significant differences between racial thinking in the 1670s and the 1830s, and given as well the disconnection, before the 1770s and 1780s, of race and nation. “Race” in this issue puts pressure on how we might think about “early America” itself. Four of the six essays focus on the period running roughly from 1820 to 1836, with 1836, in this issue, being the year that saw the publication not of Emerson’s Nature, one of the key texts of a nation-based US literary studies, but of the Jamaican James Williams’s A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, a text that needs to be read in transatlantic and hemispheric contexts. Nicole N. Aljoe’s “‘Going to Law’: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives” usefully enlarges the frame for studying the slave narrative in the Americas, showing how crucial access to the law was to West Indian ex-slaves, as well as how crucial legal form was to The History of Mary Prince (1831), Negro Slavery as Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner (1831), and Williams’s 1834 narrative. Though Aljoe is correct in saying that US slave narratives tend not to focus on specific interactions with the justice system, the far-reaching implication of her argument is to help us see the importance of law to conceptions of race and to nineteenth-century slave narratives. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Brown, and many other post- 1836 US writers of slave narratives appeal to natural rights in the way of the West Indian writers described by Aljoe. By taking account of the white amanuensis in the narratives of Prince, Warner, and Williams, Aljoe also provides fresh perspectives on the role of white editors and publishers in black literary production. But perhaps the most useful aspect of Aljoe’s essay in the context of this issue is the implied challenge to any study of slavery and race...

“Going to Law”: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives

“Going to Law”: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives

Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier Christian Pinnen Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier. By H. Sophie Burton & F. Todd Smith. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008). The Gulf South region, what would later become Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, is often neglected when it comes to the colonial history of the United States. However, this region and its cotton-producing population would come to play a decisive role in the maturation of the United States and so deserves much more scholarly attention. Authors H. Sophie Burton and F. Todd Smith use the remote settlement of Natchitoches as a case study of colonial community development in the Louisiana-Texas backcountry before the region was incorporated into the United States. Following in the footsteps of Daniel Usner's Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 and Kimberly Hanger's and Shannon Lee Dawdy's books on New Orleans, Colonial Natchitoches further advances our understanding of how the lower Mississippi Valley was settled and how these areas were later incorporated into the expanding United States.1 Colonial Natchitoches, then, is an important addition to the growing (albeit slowly) literature on the history of the colonial Gulf South. The French founded Natchitoches in 1714 and although colonial overlords changed, argue the authors, the original French settler families always dominated the town. These "first" families represented the white, free majority of the population, whereas African bondspeople represented the majority of enslaved. Interestingly, however, both white and black communities were not predominantly formed through immigration after the initial settlement in the 1710s and 1720s. Economically, the town depended on plantation slavery and cattle herding, and not the trade with the Native Americans of the area. The seven chapters of the book are arranged chronologically, and the authors masterfully dissect the different social structures in the complex world of the backcountry settlement. They follow the people of European descent, African slaves, and Free People of Color through a century of constant change. In addition, the authors engage in an enlightening discussion of the economic basis of Natchitoches in the first century of its existence. The author's approach is thematic and offers a good example of colonial social history methodology. They successfully incorporate French, Spanish, and Anglo-American sources into their findings, creating a complex, subtle picture of the village. Their evidence makes it clear that the French inhabitants continued to dominate society even after Natchitoches became Spanish in 1766 and that the original settlers were determined to uphold their French values and culture even in this remote region of North America. In this stratified society, African Americans and Indians played subordinate, but important, roles—especially when the village shifted its economic base from Indian trading to plantation agriculture after Spain took possession of the region. Spain also replaced the French Code Noir with Spanish law to govern the growing body of enslaved Africans, yet, according to the authors, the descendants of the first French settlers held on to their status and defended French social norms. Slavery became an integral part of the village with the advent of a fully developed plantation economy in the 1780s. Indian slaves, the authors conclude, were held in a system of bondage that resembled the system of Indian slavery itself: adoption into white families. Therefore, slaves of Indian descent were overwhelmingly house servants, whereas African slaves remained in the fields. The town's growing population of Free People of Color also began to carve out a place in society, often soliciting white patronage. Their numbers increased during the period of Spanish rule, but since the French elites were intent on intermarrying only with descendants of French families, and since the gender ratio was very balanced, the number of Free People of Color remained comparatively low. In a society that consisted of multiple ethnicities, the settlers of French descent were challenged to retain their dominant position. Through marriages arranged among the elites and political alliances with each other, these "first" families kept slaves, Indians, Free People of Color, and poor whites under control. The book contains a wealth of information, yet...

‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833

This article explores abolitionist treatments of East Indian slavery in the 1820s. It argues that rather than resulting from a lack of information or a conception of the qualitative difference between East and West Indian slavery, ambivalent and muted abolitionist responses to this issue prior to 1833 were conditioned by the wider imperatives of the anti-slavery campaign. Abstentionist substitution of ‘free-grown’ East India sugar for morally tainted West Indian produce, together with wider economic arguments about the equalisation of the sugar duties and the potential of India to provide a free labour alternative to the West Indian slave system, marked points of intersection between abolitionist and East India economic interests that relied on the assumption that labour in India, however cheap, was fundamentally ‘free’. As a result, rather than engaging with the various forms of slavery in India, abolitionists focused on discursively distancing them both from sugar production and from their campaign. This response suggests that abolitionist ideology was intersected by pragmatic political, economic, and discursive imperatives that precluded the universal application of humanitarian anti-slavery ideals.

Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck‐Hall , editors. Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South . Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press . 2009 . Pp. 526. $35.00.

Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck‐Hall , editors. Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South . Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press . 2009 . Pp. 526. $35.00.

Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South

Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South

Mapping the Mississippian shatter zone: the Colonial Indian slave trade and regional instability in the American South

Mapping the Mississippian shatter zone: the Colonial Indian slave trade and regional instability in the American South

Losing a Lake, Making a Mountain

Losing a Lake, Making a Mountain Matthew J. Grow (bio) Jared Farmer . On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 455 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $29.95. In this engaging book, Jared Farmer writes a biography of two linked landforms, Utah Lake and Mount Timpanogos. To the nineteenth-century Native Americans and Mormon pioneers who briefly coexisted in Utah Valley (home to Provo, about forty miles south of Salt Lake City), Utah Lake was of prime importance. Mount Timpanogos was, at the time, an undistinguished part of the Wasatch Mountains, the westernmost range of the Rocky Mountains. By contrast, contemporary residents avert their eyes from Utah Lake and define their regional identity through Mount Timpanogos. Landmark creation, Farmer suggests, was a zero-sum game; as the mountain rose into prominence, the lake (along with the Native Americans who once lived on its shores) receded from view. On Zion's Mount, recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, uses the cultural displacement of the lake by the mountain, as well as the literal replacement of Native Americans by Mormons, to examine the interaction of religion, identity, place, and memory. Farmer's central achievement is his persuasive and careful demonstration of the process by which cultural needs and values shape how people visualize, give meaning to, and relate to the natural world. Farmer's imaginative and idiosyncratic study is difficult to categorize. It fits into the genre, for instance, of recent micro-histories that use specific landmarks (such as W. Barksdale Maynard's Walden Pond) to investigate broader themes in environmental and cultural history.1 His book also contributes to scholarly debates on the history of Native American-white conflicts and place-making in the American West and to the literature on the relationship between Mormons and American culture. Lamenting that American historians have largely ignored—"whether through prejudice or indifference"—both Utah and Mormon history, Farmer justifies his choice of landmarks by arguing that Mormons represent a unique vantage point because they were simultaneously "typical and exceptional" (p. 14). Jan Shipps, a prominent scholar of Mormonism, has used the metaphor of a donut to explain the missing place of Utah and Mormonism [End Page 289] in Western historiography. Farmer prefers a geographic metaphor: "The Great Basin is that large piece of North America that has no outlet to the sea. Its runoff flows inward, where it pools and evaporates. So it is with Utah history" (p. 14). He convincingly demonstrates that it need not be so, as his study constantly spins outward not only to place local events in regional and national contexts but also to use the local to reshape larger narratives. Farmer divides his book into three primary parts, telling different components of the same story from regional, local, and national perspectives. Section one, "Liquid Antecedents," describes the geographic terrain and traces the interactions between Mormons and Native Americans in nineteenth-century Utah. He richly portrays the arid Great Basin and Utah Lake, the only freshwater lake in the Basin's lowlands, where fishing drew to its shores Native Americans who referred to themselves as Fish-Eaters, Lake People, or the Timpanogos, and later became known as the Utes. The Timpanogos established semi-permanent villages at the lake and imbued it with spiritual and cultural meaning. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, they became integrated into Spanish trading networks in pelts and Indian slaves. The Spanish introduction of the horse further transformed Indian culture, allowing some native groups to prey on others. While horses expanded the Timpanogos Indians' geographic reach, most continued to define themselves, at least in part, by their relationship to Utah Lake. Like the Utes, Mormons developed an unusual emphasis on place, as they sacralized America as the historical site of the Garden of Eden and the Israelite civilizations described in the Book of Mormon, as well as the future place of Jesus Christ's Second Coming. After their trek west, beginning in 1847, they settled in the Great Basin, which Brigham Young and other leaders lauded not only for its spiritual benefits, but also for its salubrious environment of dry...

O PROCESSO DE FORMAÇÃO DO TERRITÓRIO RONDONIENSE REVISITADO: DA COLÔNIA AO GOLPE DE 1964

In the territorial dynamics of Rondonia state was involved a violent and differentiated process. A considerable number of Indian societies were exterminated e several other groups were depredated on first called Guapore Federal Territory. This process was undertaken to seek Indian slaves and the Drogras do Sertao, at first, and the rubber and precious metals later. Considering this context, the present paper intends to comprehend the territorial formation dynamics of Rondonia state, between the colonial period and the revolution of 1930.

TWO ‘HOTTENTOTS’, SOME SCOTS AND A WEST INDIAN SLAVE: THE ORIGINS OF KAATJE KEKKELBEK

Kaatje Kekkelbek, or Life among the Hottentots, by Andrew Geddes Bain, continues to be of academic interest for three main reasons: firstly, for its peculiar linguistic composition, secondly, as one of the earliest examples of South African Settler drama, and, thirdly, for its portrayal of the life of so-called ‘Hottentots’ in the 1830s. Concerning the latter, critical opinion has been divided. This article aims to lay to rest the claims of Michael Chapman and others that Kaatje Kekkelbek is in any way sympathetic to the lot of ‘Hottentots’, as represented by the eponymous heroine, by attempting to locate the play in the historical context of its production. A further claim is then made that, owing to the form of the drama, Kaatje Kekkelbek is actually a pastiche of a slave narrative, quite possibly The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, which was edited by Thomas Pringle in London.

Fresh Perspectives on British-Indian Relations in Early Carolina and Georgia: A Welcome Reassessment

Fresh Perspectives on British-Indian Relations in Early Carolina and Georgia:A Welcome Reassessment Timothy P. Grady William L. Ramsey , The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Pp. x, 307. $50.00. Julie Anne Sweet , Negotiating for Georgia: British-Creek Relations in the Trustee Era, 1733–1752 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). Pp. xi, 267. $44.95. The recognition of the importance of Native Americans in colonial British America has been increasing among scholars for the last several decades, especially in [End Page 117] the history of the American Southeast. From the 1990s to the present, a number of impressive studies on Indian peoples such as the Creek, the Cherokee, the Catawba, and others have added to our understanding of native life during the colonial era. More recently, many scholars have begun to combine the history of Europeans and Indians in an interconnected web of contact and change that demonstrates the natives' integral role in the shaping of the region's past and present. Contributing admirably to the progress of incorporating Indian voices with the history of early South Carolina and Georgia are William L. Ramsey's The Yamasee War and Julie Anne Sweet's Negotiating for Georgia. Each work effectively blends exhaustive research with effective organization and engaging prose to provide two worthy additions to the historiographical evolution of both colonies' pasts. Ramsey's and Sweet's works represent merely the latest entries into a body of work that over the past two decades or so has enriched our knowledge and appreciation of the complexities and importance of the roles played by Native American cultures in the history of the colonial Southeast. Both books build on the foundations laid by the work of scholars of this region, starting with Verner Crane's seminal book The Southeastern Frontier (1928), which dealt largely with European interactions during the years before and after Queen Anne's War. In the 1970s Peter Wood's Black Majority (1974) espoused the critical role of African American slaves to our understanding of the early history of South Carolina. While these works commented on Indians as a part of their analysis, neither truly added to our knowledge of the roles of Indians in the story, concentrating as they did on Europeans and African Americans, respectively. The importance of European-Indian interactions during this period and how those relationships affected South Carolina and Georgia in particular were never the central focus of many works until Alan Gallay broke important new ground on the importance of the Indian trade on South Carolina in his award-winning book The Indian Slave Trade (2002). This is not to say that impressive contributions to the historiography of Indians in the region, which acknowledge the central importance of English influences on particular tribes, were not being produced. James Merrell's book on the Catawba of South Carolina, The Indians' New World (1989), paved the way for many detailed and insightful investigations of various tribes in the region. In another case, Kathryn Braund produced a masterful work on Creek-Indian interactions during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in her Deerskins & Duffels (1993). Rather, the research published on tribes such as the Catawba, Creek, Cherokee, and others concentrated on European influences on Indians rather than on the Indian influence on the Europeans. William Ramsey and Julie Anne Sweet begin to address these missing perspectives and in doing so open a door for further research and future work. In The Yamasee War, Ramsey argues simply that in considering the pivotal events and eras that shaped the course of the history of the Southeast and, more important, the roots of the "Old South," the Yamasee War was a major transformative event. This argument may, in and of itself, seem simplistic, but Ramsey is correct when he points out that the Yamasee War is a long-neglected event when it comes to tracing the roots of the antebellum South. Ramsey's main goal, larger even that his argument, is "to draw southern historical memory—so long mired in its obsession with the nineteenth century and the racial simplifications of the Civil War—farther...

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: In three decades of reading reviews of my books, I've never felt impelled to respond to a review. However, James Taylor Carson's careless, sloppy review of Stealing Indian Women in the June 2008 issue of the JAH requires a response. He complains that “a paucity of sources makes it almost impossible for Ekberg to write definitively about the Illinois slave trade” (p. 180). If Carson had read the book, he would know that I never intended to write “definitively about the Illinois slave trade,” for my subject was the quality of Indian slavery within the villages of the Illinois Country. Carson twice refers to the “murder” in the second half of the book. If he had read the book, he would have noticed that I spent many pages explaining why the death of an Indian slave woman was almost certainly not a murder. Carson accuses me of writing “old Indian history,” based on a teleological interpretation of “the inevitable decline and collapse of native peoples in the face of European/Anglo-American invasion” (ibid.). If he had read the book, he would have seen that the pathos I describe in the Peoria tribe at the end of the eighteenth century was not premised on any grand a priori scheme of inevitability but rather on hard empirical source materials.

Beyond “Authenticity”: Migration and the Epistemology of “Voice” in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba

In “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba ,” I suggest that the idea of “authenticity,” often deployed in feminist and postcolonial readings of women’s narratives, is too narrow a construct to be as productive in literary scholarship as it has been assumed. A parallel claim is that Mary Prince’s 1831 slave narrative offers a historical precedent and maintains a contemporary textual precedent in 20 th -century diasporic texts like Maryse Condé’s 1986 neo-slave narrative I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem . In both of these narratives, “authenticity” is obscured as migration and travel profoundly shape women’s identity politics. Much of the scholarly criticism that surrounds these texts, however, often presents both Prince and Tituba as independent, speaking subjects, each with a “true voice.” Such criticism, while well-intended in its attempt to offer and recuperate liberating presentations of women’s “voices,” maintains singular and limited understandings of a monolithic “black” or “female” experience.

The Yamasee War: a study of culture, economy, and conflict in the Colonial South

Indians of the Southeast series preface by Theda Perdue and Michael D. GreenIntroduction: ProblemsSection One: Tinder 1: Carolinians in Indian Country 2: Indian slaves in the Carolina Low-countrySection Two: Spark 3: Market Influence 4: Trade Regulation and the Breakdown of DiplomacySection Three: Fire5: The Heart of the Alliance 6: Auxiliary ConfederatesSection Four: Ash7: Monsters and Men 8: New Patterns of Exchange and DiplomacyConclusion: New Problems

'Ruined and Lost': Spanish Destruction of the Pearl Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

Abstract In the early sixteenth century, the area that today comprises eastern Venezuela and its offshore islands enriched Spain with pearls, supplied Spanish colonists with Indian slaves, and generated high hopes of finding interior civilisations rich in gold. However, the prosperity of Spanish colonies in this region (called the Pearl Coast) proved tragically short-lived, lasting less than two decades. Using Garrett Hardin's concept of the 'tragedy of the commons', this article examines Spanish overexploitation of both the oyster beds around the island of Cubagua and the native peoples along the mainland by competing groups of Spaniards. Building upon the works of historians such as Pablo Ojer and Enrique Otte, and utilising archival research and Otte's seldom-used compilations of primary documents, this article analyses the dramatic but little-known history of the Pearl Coast, where damage to the environment went hand in hand with the enslavement and decimation of native populations.

African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (review)

Reviewed by: African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens Kevin T. Barksdale African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens. By Celia E. Naylor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 360.) Celia E. Naylor’s African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens traces the tangled relationship between African Americans and the western Cherokee from removal (1838) through the formation of Oklahoma (1907). Relying heavily on the Works Progress Administration’s slave narratives, Naylor captures the lives of slaves and freed people residing in the Cherokee Nation and their efforts to resist their enslavement, forge multiracial identities, and obtain Indian citizenship. Naylor dedicates the first two chapters of her work to African Indian slave resistance in an effort to challenge historical misconceptions regarding Native American slavery. By recounting brazen acts of slave resistance (escapes and violence directed at slaveholders) and covert “day-to-day” defiance, Naylor refutes the historical contention that the Amerindian version of slavery was more benevolent than its counterpart in the southeast. She argues that the Cherokee Nation rejected the opportunity created by removal to abandon slavery, and chose instead to further enmesh the institution within their western communities. Removal and the accompanying political power struggle provided slaves an unprecedented opportunity to resist enslavement. Despite their efforts to exploit the turmoil surrounding removal, most slaves embraced their Indianness (89). Naylor examines the complicated interplay between blood quanta, cultural bonds, and African Cherokee identity. Through racial intermixing (biracial African Cherokee) and selective acculturation (i.e., foodways, clothing, and language), slaves embraced their Native American identity and deep cultural connections to their Indian communities. The Civil War disrupted these multiethnic communities by intensifying the slavery debate and injecting sectional tensions into Indian Territory. Naylor’s account of the war within the Cherokee Nation proves that [End Page 109] geographical distance did not “insulate” western residents from the political debates and violence (126). Cherokee antislavery, pro-Union organizations such as the Keetoowah Society clashed with proslavery, Confederate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. The threats posed by these clashes led many slaveholders to reluctantly seek refuge in Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, and the dislocation proved equally traumatic for their slaves. The Civil War did provide slaves another opportunity to escape, but most longed to return to their adopted Indian homelands. The final two chapters examine the postbellum struggle by freed people to secure Cherokee citizenship in the face of escalating racism. Following the Civil War, African Indians’ cultural ties and desires for social integration found expression in the “articulated nationalism” they demonstrated toward the Cherokee Nation (155). For the next four decades, African Indians pressed for full Cherokee citizenship rights and access to governmental annuity payments and land grants. Despite being spared much of the racially motivated political violence occurring across America, African Cherokees faced determined opposition from inside and outside of the Cherokee Nation to their demands. Efforts within the Cherokee leadership to exclude freed people from the numerous Indian roles using complex blood quanta formulas and governmental policies designed to strip property rights from all of the Cherokee, heightened tensions within the Cherokee Nation. Intertribal disputes combined with the fear that Oklahoma would become a “black state” as a result of the postwar “Great Negro Exodus” to the West, fueled support for segregation (188–89). Racial segregation was a harsh reality in Oklahoma by the time it emerged as America’s forty-sixth state, and the African Indian dream of full citizenship remained elusive. Celia E. Naylor’s refutation of benevolent Indian slavery and description of African Amerindian acculturation are not revelatory. Historians Theda Perdue and William G. McLoughlin have offered similar studies of slavery within the Cherokee Nation. Naylor also fails to connect the post-removal socioeconomic dynamics occurring among the western Cherokee to the plight of the slaveholding eastern band. Despite these criticisms, African Cherokees in Indian Territory offers readers a rich and textured glimpse of life, work, love, and loss in Indian Territory. [End Page 110] Kevin T. Barksdale Marshall University Copyright © 2009 West Virginia University Press

Stealing Indian women: Native slavery in the Illinois country

Based almost entirely on original source documents from the United States, France, and Spain, Carl J. Ekberg’s Stealing Indian Women provides an innovative overview of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley. His detailed study of a fascinating and convoluted criminal case involving various slave women and a métis (mixed-blood) woodsman named Céladon illuminates race and gender relations, Creole culture, and the lives of Indian slaves--particularly women--in ways never before possible.